#democracy has never fully existed here

[goldkirk]

okay, wow, I’m not publishing that ask, anon.

I need you to understand that online activism only reaches people who are also online.

And it only reaches people who, in our current algorithm-based internet, are actually shown that content.

When you do online activism that’s not something concrete like a petition, you’re spreading information and awareness. That’s super important.

But it’s also like, step one of twelve, and unfortunately it’s where most of us just stop. We share information and news and share guilt tripping posts and we say things should be different and we tell other people that things are terrible and we carry on and most of it makes no real-world difference at all.

I don’t know how to tell you that you have got to do local, real life activism if you want to make any change.

You have got to pay attention to your school boards and judges.

You have got to campaign for local candidates.

You have to encourage locals to run for office, or run for office yourself.

You have to volunteer your time and energy for real local causes and groups.

You have to get acquainted with your local news sources so you know who to reach out to when word needs to be spread about something important.

You have to call and contact and petition your local officials, you need to put up flyers where your actual community will see, you need to get aquatinted with local resources so you know where to direct people who need them.

You have to actually do activism irl. That is how you make change happen.

Any time you spend arguing with online users about activism and not doing enough could be spent actually making a difference in your literal real life community, or helping the people who do.

[librarycards]

I’ve seen a lot of discourse about Aaron Bushnell and madness, with reactionary genocidaires saying it is madness, and leftists saying it is not madness but principled protest. In my mind I am thinking about madness and sanity under empire, thinking I am surely mad and wondering why anyone is trying to be sane. If you have the capacity, can you share your thoughts on the madness of this moment, or point to others who have shared those thoughts?

you have very much captured the spirit of what i think! there's that common aphorism that goes something like, 'if this world is sane, then of course i'm mad' etc. etc., while i think this doesn't fully capture the specific genealogy and politic of Madness as contemporary scholar-activists understand it, it does provide a quick & effective explanation of Aaron's (z"l) decision to make the ultimate sacrifice in support of Palestinian liberation.

it isn't useful to understand his choices as solely Mad (in terms of an embrace of opacity and nonsensicality/illegibility - in fact, quite the opposite, he took pains to be explicit and serious as to his reasoning and methodology so that u.s. media discourse would struggle to obfuscate it [even though they still are]).

however, it *is* useful to use a Mad conceptual framework for some elements of Aaron's choice, and as a means of understanding pathologized forms of protest –– not only suicide, but med strike, hunger strike, etc. these forms of protest, as many have said, are designed to distress onlookers. they are designed to push against the bounds of the common[/]sensical, to gift us with possible alternatives to, you know, getting a police permit and marching in circles, AND, to the complacent, grease the stopped-up gears of their own imaginations. because Aaron did what is, in many ways (even to those of us who have attempted suicide before) unimaginable: he died. we have not yet died. he died yelling "Free Palestine." he died, and lived his last moments with a degree of moral turpitude, courage, and singleminded commitment to a cause that few will ever achieve, and yet one that –– as Aaron himself acknowledged Palestinians must muster every day.

here is where Madness comes in: Aaron acted as a linker of worlds: between that which many usamericans, and many others who have never undergone military siege/genocide, find exists outside the realm of the imaginable. a world that many would prefer to pretend does not, can not, could not exist. a world from which hegemonic media would have "us" (white americans/others in the ~western world~) believe could never exist, not least because our own military hegemons (with Aaron, until the other day, as one of their sentient weapons) protect "democracy" –– that is, the supposed exceptionality/exemption of the "(white) u.s. citizen" from terror, from sociopolitical Madness, from the absolute violence of settler colonialism. Aaron, in short, brought that unimaginable violence home. he forced us to reckon with the brutal truth of martyrdom, here. as someone on here mentioned, he used his status as an airman in what is perhaps the most effective weaponization of privilege i have ever seen. he killed a soldier, and that soldier was himself.

of course media is leaping and will continue to leap on this as evidence of extremism, of dangerous insanity, etc. etc. in radical movements. always has been. read The Protest Psychosis. the idea of insanity has been used by basically every state power to justify disposal, because it's convenient: by claiming one is insane, you also claim all of their appeals to reason are the result of their insanity. this is called anasognosia. it's a cute little trick. it isn't new. the best way to approach this is to maintain two things: one, that Aaron's choice was rational given a clearsighted understanding of the scale of genocide that's currently taking place. AND, to question those –– leftists included! pro-pal folks included! –– who uncritically cite 'mental illness' as the reason for Aaron's suicide.

this is not because Aaron wasn't what some would call "mentally ill" –– i don't know him, i do not live in his head. the point is, it does not matter if he was diagnosed with anything or not. it does not matter if he was already suicidal or not. it does not matter if he had tried to kill himself before. none of it fucking matters, and attempts to reduce this act to the result of a mad(dened) mind is to distract from the political project he pursued. he performed a politically Mad act, to which his imagined internal pathology was irrelevant. he broke consensus reality, even if only for a moment. he linked worlds. Palestinians felt it. that is what matters.

so, how did he connect worlds? he did something Mad. it is useful to understand suicide as a Mad act, so long as we are careful not to fall into the pathologizing traps that exclude suicidal people as interlocutors outright. he showed many of us, activists included, what we could be doing - the lengths to which it is possible to go in support of liberation. he did not, and i am not, encourage/ing everyone else to kill themselves. self-immolation is effective, in many ways, because so few people do it. we need to stay alive to continue the fight. however, Aaron tore the fabric of the reasonable, the possible, and the legal (consider the pigs who approached his burning body with guns) to disrupt a collective consciousness that would rather move on, equivocate, forget, tune-out. that is Mad. Madness is necessary in our movements, all of them.

[mllemaenad]

Not that you are by any means the worst offender in this regard, but it rubs me ghe wrong way how much leniency the NCR gets when it comes to considering the effects of their actions, and perhaps more importantly, their intentions.

Groups like Caesar's Legion, The Brotherhood of Steel, House's factions, The Unity, The Enclave, and The Institute are treated as villains if anyone is even indireehurt because of them.

If two human surface-dwellers kill each other in Diamond City, people blame the Institute.

If the White Legs emulate Twisted Hair cultural traditions without fully understanding them, Ulysses blames the Legion.

And yet... the NCR is treated by fans as well-intentioned and good-natured despite the harm they cause. The situation in Nipton was the fault of the NCR. Its corrupt Mayor was from the NCR. The Powder Gangers were only in the Mojave because the NCR moved them there.

Vulpes set up his lottery (not that I'm saying it was a perfect solution) to address a problem that had gotten out of hand, a problem downstream of the NCR... and yet most fan discussions blame the Legion for what happened in Nipton.

ThevNCR seems to get a pass because people see their goals as noble... but their goals are to recreate the exact conditions that caused the Great War!

We see the exact same phenomena in pre-war terminals as we do in contemporary NCR. A government more obsessed with maintaining its own power than solving problems, a corrupt justice system that favours the wealthy, an obsession with democracy that makes decisions slow and bureaucratic, and a rapacious desire for resources that leads to expansion and conflict eith other factions.

Why is Caesar condemned for his ego, and his shortsigtedness, but Kimball is not?

Why is Roger Maxon blamed for creating an organisation that has hurt people, but not Aradesh?

Why is Justin Ayo blamed for his secrecy and lack of trust, but not Colonel Moore?

It's a double-standard. Others are blamed for trying something new, the NCR gets carte blanch to repeat old mistakes!

Hi, anonymous person.

So ... I've read this, and I've read it again, and again after that and ... I'm a little puzzled about what's bothering you. The NCR is broadly attempting to feed, clothe and house hundreds of thousands of people ... and fans tend to give them a little more leeway when they fuck up than they do, say, the Enclave, which is a fascist organisation bent on global genocide and this is ... bad?

Honestly not really seeing the problem there.

I've barely written anything about the NCR, and certainly not in depth character profiles of the people you bring up, so I'm not completely sure why this is directed at me. If you're saying that there are fans who refuse to acknowledge that the NCR has flaws ... well, I haven't met those people, but if you look for an opinion on the internet you'll probably find it, so I'm not going to try to claim they don't exist. I've seen people claim women don't play Fallout, which is kind of a problem, from where I'm sitting. :)

But. Well, okay.

It's a double-standard. Others are blamed for trying something new, the NCR gets carte blanch to repeat old mistakes!

Nobody's trying anything new. That's kind of the point here. War never changes. Just to do the main antagonists ...

Richard Grey/The Master is just doing eugenics with a sci-fi twist. He's going to forcibly convert everyone who can be into a super mutant, and prevent any remaining humans from breeding. One of the ways to beat him is to tell him that his "master race" is sterile. It's a horrifying plan.

The Enclave are American fascists. They believe that only their people are truly human and that everyone else should literally die.

Edward Sallow/Caesar is ... I mean he's just cosplaying as Caius Julius Caesar because he thinks it looks cool. That's an actual human being who lived, and who quite famously got stabbed to death. More historical precedent than you could shake a gladius at. Sallow got over excited when he read Caesar's Commentaries and decided he wanted to be Caesar. Presenting "doing ancient Rome" as new is ... certainly something, and particularly hilarious as a plan for a civilisation given the decades long clusterfuck that was the fall of the Roman Republic, plus fun subsequent imperial followups like "the year of the four emperors".

The Institute has just reintroduced slavery, only this time let's 3D print the people instead of abducting them so literally no one will care what we do to them! They also lean into the idea that they are the only real people, although they are not quite as committed to this as the Enclave.

What's new and exciting here that I should be willing to give a try? They're all old ideas, and ideas that seem to involve a lot of genocide, enslavement and general misery for anybody who isn't part of a specific in group.

Vulpes set up his lottery (not that I'm saying it was a perfect solution) to address a problem that had gotten out of hand, a problem downstream of the NCR… and yet most fan discussions blame the Legion for what happened in Nipton.

I ... what? Yeah, I'm going to disappoint you here. The massacre at Nipton was the Legion's fault because they were the ones who walked in there and, you know, massacred people. Mayor Steyn was absolutely engaging in a round of "play stupid games, win stupid prizes" and if anybody tries to argue that he was competent I will dispute that wholeheartedly. But there was only a massacre because the Legion actively set one up.

There's political corruption in Nipton, but the problem of the Legion is that they think a lottery that decides who gets beheaded, who gets crucified and who gets sold into slavery is some sort of solution to that problem, rather than an atrocity. That's why they're still the bad karma choice, even if the NCR is kind of fucking things up.

Also ... ha. I promise you imitating ancient Rome is not going to solve your political corruption problems. I mean ... I know Vulpes Inculta makes his little speech, but Rome never did solve the problem of profiteering governors and corrupt politicians. This is not a problem that is going to miraculously disappear under Legion rule. And the idea of Rome somehow getting rid of prostitution is just ... Honestly, Caesar's Legion would be hilarious if you didn't have to have these conversations standing next to people dying on crosses.

If two human surface-dwellers kill each other in Diamond City, people blame the Institute.

... Diamond City is run by the Institute, under the synth-replacement of Mayor McDonough. The leadership actively plays up the paranoia in the city by refusing to investigate disappearances. The particular scene you are describing is paired with one that occurs in Goodneighbor, where the neighborhood watch is able to accurately identify a synth infiltrator – because they are not Institute run.

It's also a feature of gameplay that an inhabitant of one of your settlements may be a synth infiltrator and become hostile to the other settlers. So I'm pretty sure people are blaming the Institute for things they're doing.

If the White Legs emulate Twisted Hair cultural traditions without fully understanding them, Ulysses blames the Legion.

... The Legion massacred Ulysses' people. They enslaved some and crucified the rest along the roadside, like Spartacus's army of old. That's why he's the only one left who understands what the braids mean. His reaction is somewhat unfair to the White Legs, yes, who had no way of knowing what they were doing was wrong ... but I can't see why blaming the Legion would be a problem. They did, in fact, exterminate his people.

ThevNCR seems to get a pass because people see their goals as noble… but their goals are to recreate the exact conditions that caused the Great War!

There's a line I like, that Deacon says in Fallout 4.

I never really much cared for the Minutemen. The idea sounds great. But you give small men big power and sometimes you'll pay for it. –Fallout 4, Deacon Miscellaneous Dialogue

In the context of Fallout 4, the Minutemen are the scrappy underdogs you root for. They're helping to rebuild the shattered settlements of the Commonwealth and they're a potential source of resistance against the Institute. But if you talk to Preston, you get hints of the politics and infighting that brought them down the first time. There's no reason that couldn't happen again. They could become a controlling and exploitative organisation.

Do I think that means you shouldn't work with them? No, of course not. You deal with the situation in front of you. You try to support the people who aim to make life better for everyone.

If we roll back around to the Commonwealth in Fallout 8 or something (assuming I haven't died of old age by then) and the Minutemen have become a military dictatorship ruling the people with an iron fist ... well, we go deal with the fucking Minutemen then.

Deacon's right about the threat, but if you don't take the chance on trusting people, you never build anything.

It's a thing in Fallout. War never changes. There are some truly evil, terrible ideas that turn up again and again and need to be slapped down. But there is no perfect Utopia on the other side of it. There are just communities banding together to try and make it work. What stops them from going bad? Nothing. It can always happen. You make the best choices you can in every story, given what you have to work with.

Or you do an evil playthrough. Your choice. Not my business.

The NCR is supposed to hurt. Watching them fail is supposed to hurt. It's no good if it doesn't hurt. No one cries when you blow up the Enclave. That's a job well done. You can't say good things about them.

The point of the NCR is that you can. They have some runs on the board! Democracy! Agriculture! Education! You want them to make it work. And yeah, it lets you ask much more interesting questions like: how many fuck ups do we let slide?

We don't need the Enclave, or the Legion, to fuck up to know they're bad news. Their goals are bad. We want them gone. But with the NCR ... how much bad are we okay with, to keep the good?

You haven't given me any examples to work with, so I can't reasonably speak to what fans say. But I don't think the games give them any sort of uncritical pass. Fallout New Vegas is ... absolutely about the problems of colonialism and aggressive expansionism. It's very clear that the NCR has not made good choices recently. The game gives you a lot of room to figure out what you want to do about that, and no answer is perfect.

It's only with regard to the Legion specifically that it's an obviously moral choice – and they level the playing field for you there. Both the Legion and the NCR have imperial pretensions, and those are not good. But since that specific thing is the same, well, we're supporting the people who aren't implementing mass slavery and treating women as "breeding stock", right?

If there are people who won't admit flaws in the NCR, well, yeah, I'd call them wrong. But I don't really think it's a double standard to favour a group that doesn't have "wouldn't it be great if we murdered everybody" as a core philosophy over one that does.

[luceafarul-de-dimineata]

Asmodeus' trip to the human world

(Takes place in the same universe as the Tired Dad!Lucifer AU, so there are things in here that will be disproven by canon. For now we just roll with it)

All the devil kings were in their late teens, so Lucifer had a bit less to worry about. They were able to take care of their countries without Lucifer calling them every hour to make sure they don't start a war. Lucifer had a tiring day at the hospital, as always, and he layed down on the bed exhausted. Gamigin (who was Morax's substitute since Morax got way too injured trying to save another demon) went up to Lucifer with a bunch of papers in his hands. He was a bit nervous since it was the first time Gamigin was directly asked by Lucifer to be his assistent.

Gamigin: Your Majesty Lucifer, today is an important day in Hell. Have you gotten his majesty Asmodeus a gift for his birthday?

Lucifer glared at him confused and tired. He groaned and got up from his bed to check the calander

Lucifer: I made you my assistent because I thought you were an inteligent creature inspite of your dragonic origins. Do you seriously think I would forget one of my... business partner's date of birth? Do you even know who I am?! Look! Asmodeus' birthday is on the 5th of November! And today is... the... 5th...

Lucifer stared at the calendar for a few minutes, unmoving. Gamigin was worried that Lucifer got psychic damage from the revalation, so he stroked Lucifer's sholder. Lucifer turned to him and glared at the intern assistent.

Lucifer: If you value your life even a smidge, you won't speak of this incident for the rest of your meaningless existence.

Gamigin nodded and Lucifer sighed pacing in his office. Lucifer grabbed his phone and called Asmodeus.

Asmodeus: Lucifer, you never call me, what happened?

Lucifer: ...happy birthday

Asmodeus: Hahaha did you really call me just to wish me a happy birthday?

Lucifer: yes, you should be grateful, you and Belphegor are the only ones who's I have marked on my calendar.

Asmodeus: I feel honored, Luci

Lucifer: Never call me that again

Asmodeus: You know, I actually wanted to call you as well. There's something only you can do, and I think it's selfish not to share, especially since you don't use that power that often.

Lucifer: I'm never giving you or Beelzebub any more drugs.

Asmodeus: No no, not that, Beelzebub has a new plug. I was talking about your ability to go to the human world. I wanna go meet some hot human bitches and twinks. Get my dick wet a tad.

Lucifer: No. Never. No demons in the human world.

Asmodeus: Oh come on, it's my birthday! How come you can go on Earth and gowk at some human ass, but when I want to do it, it's illegal?

Lucifer: Don't you dare bring Catalina into this!

As Gamigin heard the two argue on the phone, he tapped Lucifer sholder.

Lucifer: What?!

Gamigin: How about you go visit his majesty Asmodeus at his palace and have a talk there? It would be more democratic.

Lucifer: ...Gamigin, this is an absolutist monarchy, there is no democracy, you do what I tell you to do.

Asmodeus: Wait... Gamigin? My man, where have you been? I haven't seen you since that one orgy in december. We should totally meet one of these days.

Lucifer: You two know eachother? Doesn't matter. Asmodeus, make sure your wearing clothes. I'm teleporting in your apartment in negative five minutes.

Gamigin had already drawn Asmodeus' pentagram on the floor that transported Lucifer and him to the lust kings office. It was dark with red LED lights illuminating the borderline sex dungeon. Asmodeus was wearing a thong and nothing else. There were a few demons having a messy orgy in one of the corners, a lady in a full latex suit domminating a tied up woman in another and three buff men stripping. Lucifer had grown used to Asmodeus' prefrences when it came to assistents, but Gamigin, even as a fully grown demon, still felt flustered by the lewd displays.

Asmodeus: Welcome back to Abbanon, Lucifer!

Lucifer: Why in your office? Do they not have rooms?

Lucifer cringed when he stepped in a sticky white liquid that looked more like a puddle than anything.

Asmodeus: If they're at home, I can't watch them. I have great multi-attention skills. Fucking your assistents as a king is abuse of power, but making them fuck eachother in front of you isn't.

Lucifer: It still is.

Asmodeus: Not in Abbanon, it isn't.

Gamigin: Does Abbanon have laws?

Asmodeus: People over 18 aren't allowed to have sex with people under 18, but people under 18 can fuck eachother if they want. If you fuck a corpse or an animal, wear a condom so you won't get a nasty infection (Paradise Lost stopped taking in petiants from Abbanon that got injured due to sex, fuck you Lucifer for that one). We don't kink shame and we don't force people into sex... we drug them into being ok with it.

Lucifer: I don't care about your degenarate country's laws, I want to destow opon you a present of your choosing.

Before Asmodeus could even ask for human world access, Lucifer denied it.

Asmodeus: What do you have against me in particular? I mean, you're nice to Belphegor and Leviathan, but the moment I ask something of you, you turn your nose away?

Lucifer: I like Leviathan and Belphegor because they don't ask for anything. You were a very demanding child to raise and I hold nothing but contempt for you and Beelzebub. You two are so gross and unsanitary all the time, before I stopped admiting your succubi in the emergiancy room, it was filled with just yeast infections, UTIs, STDs, mutilation, anal bleeding. It didn't help that during all the operations to cure them, they were constantly moaning. You know I have to restrain one of my best healers cause he gets horny and aggressive swiftly, I don't want your obsecene incubi making it harder for him.

Asmodeus: You, Lucifer, act all high and mighty just because you were the first. But the same God that made you, made me as well. Lust is as much a part of nature as any virtue. One would think you knew that from how you were with Catalina.

Lucifer: That has nothing to do with you.

Asmodeus: Just let me finish, jeez. You learned something from your encounter with her, with humanity. If you want me to change, maybe you should let me experience the wider world, not just the one we made for ourselves down here. Please, let me do this. Trust me, one month in the human world and I'll come back a changed person. I promise you... and unlike you, I cannot lie.

Lucifer stared at Asmodeus' desprate face when he heard that. He sighed and remembered that he acted the same when he was Asmodeus' age. He walks closer to Asmodeus, glaring him down. When he's right next to him, he puts a hand over his sholder ackwardly before taking it back and murmurs.

Lucifer: One month. No more, no less.

Asmodeus: One month. And then I'll just do it myself like wiith the drugs.

Lucifer: And this is why you can't have nice things. Also, you owe me big time for this one.

Asmodeus: Got it!

Once Lucifer left, Asmodeus was extatic and deeply kissed one of the male strippers. He needed to take his excitment out somehow.

[mariacallous]

CHEMNITZ, Germany—Werner enthusiastically waved a white, red, and blue Russian tricolor flag—with the added imperial crest of the tsars—as we talked outside the former Stasi headquarters of what was once Karl Marx City, now Chemnitz, in eastern Germany.

“The current German state is worse than what we had during communist times, and America, not [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, is the true evil of this world,” he said, aggressively thrusting his finger in my face, our conversation eavesdropped on by a giant statue of Marx. 

A retired bricklayer in his 70s, Werner might be expected to have mellowed with age. He’s old enough to have been briefly interrogated by the Stasi in the 1980s and to remember his father, a former Nazi soldier, returning disheveled from Soviet imprisonment in the 1950s. But none of that has stemmed his apparent sympathy for Russian imperialism, nor his anger at the West. 

“German reunification benefited only the West Germans, and Germany should leave us Saxons alone,” he said. “Germany should also leave Putin alone, as it was far worse to Russia in World War II than Putin is to Ukraine now.” 

Meet the Free Saxons movement. Werner has been attending every Monday rally of the secessionist right-wing monarchist movement that seeks to restore the kingdom of Saxony, which historically never had much weight beyond its own borders during its 112-year existence that ended with World War I. And like much of the German political fringe, it finds curious common ground with Putin’s Russia.

The Russian president has exerted influence over East German attitudes toward Russia since he arrived in Dresden, Saxony’s regional capital, on his first posting as a young KGB agent in the mid-1980s. His foreign assignment in East Germany came to an abrupt end on Dec. 5, 1989, when demonstrators occupied the Stasi headquarters. Another crowd rushed to the nearby KGB office where he had a close encounter as they came close to storming the building. His subsequent calls to the Red Army for protection and reinforcements were met with silence, something Putin has never forgiven or forgotten.

In perhaps his most famous quote, Putin told the Russian parliament in 2005 that the collapse of the USSR was the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century.” To him, it was an experience of personal humiliation. In 1990, he returned with his young family to his hometown of Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, where he claimed to have had to drive a taxi to make ends meet, before landing a more lucrative gig as the serial president, sometimes prime minister, of Russia.

But almost 40 years later he still finds receptive ears in the former Soviet satellite where a curious alliance of elements from across the political spectrum has voiced sympathy or support for his invasion of Ukraine. A survey conducted last October suggests that 40 percent of Germans fully or partially believe that NATO provoked Russia into invading Ukraine; that number increases to 59 percent in provinces that were once part of communist East Germany. Saxony, East Germany’s most populous federal state, falls slap bang in the middle of that anti-NATO heartland. 

In his vendetta against the West, Putin has sought to erode Western liberal democracies and the Euro-Atlanticist compact, boosting destabilizing political candidates and supporting local separatist groups regardless of their ideological alignment. Russian disinformation campaigns have been linked to, among other events, the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States, the Scottish and Catalonian independence referendums, and Brexit.

Here in Chemnitz, it seems that Saxony is next on the list. 

On a camping table set up next to Werner, political brochures and stickers called for an alliance between Saxony and Russia. There were flags of the historical Kingdom of Saxony and calls for “Säxit”—à la Brexit—far-reaching autonomy from Germany or even Saxony’s secession. 

The Free Saxons, while nominally preoccupied with regional secessionism, offer a broad church of pro-Russian sentiment that has variously united far-right extremists, Soviet nostalgics, and marginalized anti-government cranks who rant about everything from vaccines to 5G to the war in Ukraine.

“Saxony has always had a public opinion different from the rest. We want good relations with Russia. No weapons for Ukraine,” said Michael Brück, a Free Saxons spokesman who sees the war in Ukraine as one between “Slavic peoples” and one in which Germany has no business.

“The people here think of [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky as an actor, a criminal, and a puppet of the United States. Putin is his counterpart. He stands up to U.S. imperialism. Most people here are anti-U.S. Here in Saxony, the people remember the Dresden firebombing [in early 1945, a joint Royal Air Force and U.S. Army Air Forces operation]. For the people here, the Americans are warmongers.”

That history, plus decades of economic deprivation, sowed the seeds of dissent and even radicalism in Saxony. Notably, it was a member of the Saxon-Thuringia aristocracy who planned an attempted coup in Germany in 2022. Prince Heinrich XIII Reuss joined with the Reichsbürger—a far-right imperial revivalist movement—in its attempt to overthrow the government. The plot was uncovered in December when prosecutors arrested 25 Reichsbürger plotters, including Reuss and current and former security service members. The putsch was derided for its grandiose ambition and dead-on-arrival failure. But it was a sobering reminder of the resurgence of the German far right and its apparent willingness to commit violent revolutionary acts. The killing of two police officers in January 2022 was also tied to the Reichsbürger, while in April 2022 a Reichsbürger member tried to kill several police officers while they attempted to execute a search warrant for the illegal possession of firearms. The ringleader, Reuss, reportedly celebrated the 2022 Russia National Day in Russia’s consulate general in Leipzig.

As Russia did with the Trump campaign and Brexit, Saxony has become a target of pro-Russian messaging and misinformation, which flourishes in a post-truth media landscape.

“Nobody believes the [mainstream] media here. If the German media says tomorrow it is going to be sunny, we Saxons will put our raincoats on. That’s why people turn to Telegram,” a social media platform widely used in Russia and Ukraine, Brück said.

Since the government enforced closure of the Russia Today (RT) operation in Germany, Kremlin sympathizers have tuned in to Russian-linked independent media and influencers. “Anti-Spiegel,” a play on German newspaper Der Spiegel, is run by Thomas Röper, a German blogger living in St. Petersburg, a Kremlin-loyal peddler of disinformation, conspiracy theories, and Russian propaganda. Russian media reports are also translated and published for a German audience. It has 110,000 Telegram subscribers. Another German blogger, Alina Lipp—a former German language correspondent for RT—plays an important role chirruping Russian propaganda to her 196,000 Telegram subscribers. Her widest-reaching posts reportedly receive over 2 million views. 

Their messages are finding their mark. In February, the Berlin-based Center for Monitoring, Analysis, and Strategy (CeMAS) released a paper on the role of Russian disinformation in Germany, finding that between the spring and autumn of 2022, approval of pro-Russian propaganda narratives increased significantly, especially in the east. 

Putin’s disinformation warriors have coincided with the rise of anti-technocratic movements on both sides of the ideological divide, a boon to those in Moscow looking to destabilize the centrist consensus that has dominated German politics for decades. The hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has within a year doubled its average poll numbers, riding a wave of populist outrage over immigrants and energy prices. The AfD, whose delegations occasionally visit Moscow, wants to dissolve the EU, strengthen Germany’s individual national military posture at the expense of Germany’s NATO engagement, and end all sanctions against Russia.

Recent national polling put the AfD at 22 percent, ahead of the ruling Social Democratic Party, and trailing only the conservative Christian Democratic Union, at 27 percent. In several eastern states, the AfD polls above 30 percent and has grabbed one mayorship and one district administrator post. 

The AfD, like many others in the east, has a big crush on the Kremlin. A regional legislator, Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, founded an association called East Wind, seeking to forge closer ties with Russia. He tried to visit Russian-occupied territory in eastern Ukraine late last year, before even AfD leadership balked at the optics. Tillschneider has said before that Russia was the liberator of Germany in World War II, unlike the United States. 

“There are still tens of thousands American soldiers occupying our country,” he said, referring to U.S. troops who have spent decades there as part of NATO’s defense against that very same Russia. “The USA wants to make us pawns on the Ukrainian battlefield to expand its ‘rainbow [LGBT] empire.’”

The German far right loves that kind of talk. But the German left is on board, too, reasoning that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The Alliance for Peace in Brandenburg holds vigils on leftist outrage topics, like the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945 or NATO nuclear drills, and lobbies against Western arms deliveries to Ukraine. Dominik Mikhalkevich, the Alliance’s Belarus-born spokesman, said NATO drills are escalatory and Germany’s defense mandate should be just to protect its own territory.

“Sanctions against Russia should be dropped, as sanctions always play in the wrong hands,” Mikhalkevich said. “I am from Belarus, a country where Western sanctions have always caused the opposite they were designed to achieve, as illustrated by [Belarusian President Aleksandr] Lukashenko still being around.”

Much like what happened in the United States, the special trick with Russian misinformation is how it manages to appeal to both the far right and the far left. German rightists love—and cite—Russia’s gripes about alleged Ukrainian oppression of Russian speakers in the country’s east and south and its claimed defense of white Christian European culture, said Jakub Wondreys, of the Hannah Arendt Institute for the Research on Totalitarianism in Dresden. Yet they are curiously quiet about Russia’s claims to be “de-Nazifying” Ukraine, for obvious reasons.

The left, meanwhile, is happy to ape Putin’s anti-NATO rhetoric but overlooks his social conservatism. “Both sides are cherry-picking their arguments from the Russian disinformation campaign,” Wondreys said.

But Germany’s left, split between Putin supporters and opponents, is in free fall. It’s the right that is ascendant. An AfD win in the next parliamentary election in 2025 could turn Germany into a big Hungary, said Wolfgang Muno, a political scientist at the University of Rostock. Hungary under Prime Minister Viktor Orban is Russia’s Trojan horse inside the European Union, consistently backing Moscow while blocking Brussels’s efforts to impose sanctions or wean off Russian energy.

“We can see what happens when Putin lackeys rule in Hungary,” Munro said. If the AfD joins a ruling coalition, he said, sanctions on Russia, and perhaps large-scale German arms deliveries to Ukraine such as Leopard tanks, would be on the chopping block, and Putin would get a lifeline.

[ffordesoon]

David Graeber: I lived in Madagascar for two years, in an area that was not under state control in any immediate sense. There was a nation state, but after the revolutions of the mid-70s, it had largely given up on the countryside, and rural communities had basically become self-governing.

[…]

So by sheer coincidence I am one of the few anarchists I know who actually had an opportunity to witness self-organized communities that existed largely outside of any top-down coordinating authority. They could do it in part just because they didn’t put it in such terms. Non-violent resistance, conflict resolution, consensus decision-making, all that was just life; it was the way people had conducted themselves since they were children.

Then some years later, I was back in America and I got involved in direct action groups who were attempting to rebuild these kinds of processes and sensibilities. It took me a while to figure out we were trying to create exactly the same thing. But we had no idea what we were doing, so everything had to be made explicit. Americans pride themselves on being a democratic society, but if you ask the average American “When was the last time you were part of a group of more than five people who made a collective decision on a more or less equal basis?” most will just scratch their heads. Maybe when ordering a pizza. Or deciding what movie to go to. But otherwise basically never.

When I got involved in the Direct Action Network and other anarchist groups, we had regular trainings on how to make decisions by consensus process, and they helped me finally understand a lot of what I’d observed in Madagascar. “Oh, that was a block!” Because in Madagascar all this was so fully integrated in everyday existence, which I guess is the sense you are talking about, Assia. It was a social capacity everyone has that had come to seem entirely unreal to Americans.

But it’s more than just never having had the experience of coming to collective decisions. We’re also taught such things are impossible. Not directly of course, or not usually. There are endless institutions operating in ostensibly “democratic” societies which might as well have been designed (and in some cases, I suspect, were in fact designed) to teach us that democracy would never really work.

[…]

So here I am back in the US, taking part in anarchist groups that operate on consensus process, taking part in spokescouncils where a thousand people organized into affinity groups, with some basic training in direct democracy—hand-signals and the like—all sit in a room and come to collective decisions without a leadership structure.

Then you walk out of the room and you realize, wait a minute, I’ve been taught my entire life, in a thousand subtle and not-so-subtle ways, that something like what I just witnessed could never happen. So you start to wonder how many other impossible things are not really impossible after all?

—David Graeber, in conversation with Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Nika Dubrovsky, and Assia Turquier-Zauberman, Anarchy - In a Manner of Speaking

[crazy-pages]

Okay, so I know this isn't the take anybody wants, but there actually is a difference between political violence and institutional violence. The violence of government commits or permits to occur on its own citizens, or inflicts on others is institutional violence. Violence for the purpose of ensuring someone takes or cannot take political power is political violence.

Obviously there is often overlap here, historically institutional violence and political violence against black people to prevent them from voting in the United States has gone pretty hand in hand. But there is a meaningful difference between the institutional violence the United States commits on poor people and the political violence of assassination and let's talk about that.

The thing about institutional violence is that it can sometimes be resolved by non-violent methods or through deescalatory threats of violence. The March on Washington and the Black Panthers shadowing cops both good examples of deescalatory threats of violence. Meanwhile the Black Panthers' school breakfast programs we're in excellent non-violent way of defraying the institutional violence of poverty by replacing it with institutional support.

Political violence however, is corrosive in a way which always leads to one of three ends: failure, an authoritarian state which commits large amounts of political violence, or catastrophic amounts of political violence to re-establish nonviolent political processes. And there's a very simple reason for that.

Killing one person doesn't matter. Yeah there's a lot of historical cases where killing one person change the course of history, but never in predictable ways. Sometimes killing the Tsar just makes his son more reactionary. Sometimes killing person just makes them a martyr. Sometimes it takes the steam out of a movement. It's basically impossible to tell beforehand, but it typically doesn't help. Because the institutional apparatus which allows that one person to do institutional harm typically still exists.

And with Trump, you better believe it exists with or without him. He's fully willing to enact Project 2025, but the man is barely literate. He didn't write any of it, and all the people who did would still be alive if you killed him. And any possible Republican candidate who could replace him would gleefully enacted in his place.

Well okay, what about wider scale political violence I hear you say? In a purely hypothetical scenario, couldn't you just kill enough of the fascists before they take power? And the answer is, not without government support. It's just not possible to kill the sheer scale of people required to destabilize an institution without the tacit permission or direct assistance of the government. Typically when revolutionary organizations opposing the government commit systemic assassination campaigns they are either lashing out in a way which doesn't accomplish much, or they are deliberately trying to provoke a backlash which will drive people into their arms to escape government violence. It's just not really feasible to commit violence on that scale without the support of the state.

Which brings us to the core problem. States which commit wide scale political violence in the pursuit of a particular party keeping power go bad real quick! The whole reason democracies are better than autocracies, even anemic mostly oligarchic democracies like it what the US currently has, is because you need the support of a lot of people to hold power. And there's limits on how bad a government can make things for how many people before losing that support, even if the minimum threshold of support can be very unenthusiastic or come from less than the 50% of the population you would hope for in a true democracy. This is known as the winning coalition, the key players you have to have on your side to hold power.

But authoritarian regimes only need the support of a few hundred or a few thousand key players. The right generals, the right tax people, the right police chiefs, the right governors, etc. Which means those people and their bottom lines become more important than anything else. Even a benevolent dictator has limits on how benevolent they can be, simply because if they're not funneling enough resources into those people, those people are going to pick a different authoritarian dictator.

And the thing is, once a government is enacting enough political violence to fully destroy an opposing political party, the individuals involved in the perpetration of that political violence become that small winning coalition. Political leaders have to satisfy them, the specific individuals who organize the violence, carry it out, handle logistics of it, handle the public relations of it, etc, before everyone else. Because if they don't, they can kill them!

So committing enough political violence to actually affect democratic processes is corrosive to the very concept of democracy. Even if the people it's being committed against are fascists who have every intent to destroy democracy themselves, the result of successful implementation of that political violence becomes an authoritarian state.

(Note: This isn't to say that counter protest violence against fascist organizing attempts doesn't work, just that it's a different beast than assassinations.)

The only way for successful political violence to end in a non authoritarian system is for the enactors of political violence to fail to achieve a monopoly on political violence and to continue escalating political violence against one another to such a degree and for so long that everybody becomes sick of it and sits down at the negotiating table. More often than not, this looks like a civil war and a lot of people die. And there has never been a guarantee that the results of that negotiation are going to be good. Sometimes they are, but typically not.

Sad fact: The people who are good at wielding political violence to get what they want, and the people who make good arbiters of government organizing principles rarely overlap.

And here's the thing. The politicians who keep on saying political violence has no place in our democracy know enough civics to understand this. Or they are being fed lines by people who do. Or, probably in quite a few cases, they simply know there is a history of this being the proper response because other people who know their civics have said this before, and their parroting that "proper response".

Using political violence to control the political process is a dead end for nation states. If it succeeds, it either degrades the state into an authoritarian one, or it escalates to the point where the state functionally collapses and is recreated. (And that is always characterized by oceans of blood.) It is escalatory in a way institutional violence is not necessarily. It is the end of democracy.

I think US politicians are very often hypocrites of the highest order in how willing they are to erode other states with political violence, versus how scared they are other than the United States. And I think there's a deep unfairness to a politician recognizing the genuine badness of political violence when they refuse to recognize or care about how bad the institutional violence of their own state is.

But they are not wrong about how corrosive political violence is.

Sure, one attempted assassination on Donald Trump isn't going to end democracy in the United States, this is not the first time somebody's tried to assassinate a US president or presidential candidate. But assassinations often spawn copycats, and if that starts snowballing and you actually get enough political violence to control the outcome of democratic processes, it really is the end of democracy. There is a good reason politicians from all sides of the political spectrum are clamping down on this so hard, even as infuriatingly hypocritical about it so many of them are.

This is simply not a road which leads anywhere good.

I think it's stupid when people say political violence has no place in this country when our government uses violence against poor people every day. Why does a person sleep outside in the cold when the car dealership is heated all night? Why do people go hungry when grocery stores pack dumpsters with perfectly edible food? Because of the threat of violence. Because someone with a gun will show up if you even try it.

[goldiers1]

Biden and Petro (Columbia) Meet: What's On The Agenda?

  Transcript of the conversation

PRESIDENT BIDEN:  Well, Mr. President, welcome.  It’s great to see you here in the Oval Office and in Washington. And, by the way, Happy Birthday. PRESIDENT PETRO:  (Laughs.)  Gracias.  Muy amable. (As interpreted.)  It was yesterday.  The 19th of April is a very important date for Colombia, for Latin America, and for me as well. PRESIDENT BIDEN:  Well, it’s very difficult turning 40 years of age.  (Laughter.) PRESIDENT PETRO:  (As interpreted.)  They say that, in this generation, being 63 is like being 40 in the old generation. PRESIDENT BIDEN:  I fully subscribe to that. Mr. President, I’ve long believed, as you probably know, that Colombia is the key to the hemisphere — and I mean that sincerely — the keystone.  And I think we have an opportunity, if we work at it hard enough, to have a Western Hemisphere that is united, equal, democratic, and — and — and — and economically prosperous. Together, Colombia and the United States are leading an effort to deal with climate change and to — I’ve been working for a long time, and we make — we’re going to make a $500 million commitment to deal with preserving the Amazon. And working through the Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity, we’re working to grow our economies from the bottom up and the middle out, not from the top down. And I know we share one view very passionately: that it’s inherent — their inherent dignity and the rights of individual workers. We’re also working together to counter narcotics trafficking and address the historic levels of migration in our hemisphere, especially through the Darién Gap. And, Mr. President, I want to thank you for the hospitality and support Colombia continues to show to Venezuelan refugees.  It’s a humanitarian and a generous thing for you — that you’re doing. And as I know you know, we’re working closely with regional partners to help Colombia meet this challenge, which is consequential and — and costly. And I really want to thank you for your outspoken and strong commitment to peace and human rights across the Americas.  You speak to it all the time. And as we begin the next century of our partnership, I believe we can do even more to deepen and develop cooperation.  So I want to thank you again for taking the time to be here, and I look forward to our conversations. PRESIDENT PETRO:  Gracias. (As interpreted.)  The Americas has, across all the countries, two common elements in its history. Unlike other parts of the world, our countries grew ever since their founding under the concepts of democracy and freedom. The concept of democracy and freedom is not etched in stone; rather, it is a flow.  It flows along, and it evolves with history and becomes ever more profound. So we are going down the same river, a river that leads us to ever greater democracy and ever greater freedom. We also share in common that in this hemisphere there’s almost never been war between the nations, between the peoples.  We are well accustomed to peace and not war.  Therefore, democracy, freedom, and peace constitute our common agenda. And if we look at the economy, today, humankind and the whole Earth calls for an in-depth thoroughgoing economic change. We need to move from a fossil fuel sort of capital, the coveting of fossil fuel — which has evolved like a hurricane that is increasingly threatening our existence — to an economy that does not use coal, oil, or gas. If we put together these pillars of political and economic — on the political side, democracy, freedom, and peace; and on the economic side, building decarbonized economies — then I think we can have a common destiny whereby this region of the Americas can become a beacon for all humankind. I believe that humankind in the Americas may well have the greatest potential for democracy and freedom in the Americas, as well as the greatest potential for green energies — clean energies. So we have a common agenda and a lot of work to do. Thank you so much for having received me in your house. PRESIDENT BIDEN:  Well, I couldn’t agree with you more. By the way, this morning I had a teleconference with 10 other nations in preparation for the next COP meeting.  And I honestly believe we’re making some real progress moving toward a carbon-free environment. And one of the things we may talk about is how we can be of assistance in coming through the Panama Canal to Colombia for your electric needs.  But that’s for a longer discussion. Thank you all.   Sources: THX News & The White House. Read the full article

[theoptimisticpatriot]

On sovereignty and small boats

The government is trying to put its Brexit coalition back together.

At first sight, the government’s high-profile promotion of its new Illegal Migration Bill seems counter-productive. By any measure its performance on small boats has been grossly incompetent. While the number of boat crossings has increased sharply, the total number seeking asylum in the UK not so. The spiralling backlog on the processing of claims, largely because of a failure to invest in and train sufficient staff, is inexcusable. Thousands of asylum seekers are now housed in hotels where they face the anger of local communities and create a focus for far-right groups. The costs run into millions of pounds per day. The operation of the new Bill requires thousands of secure detention places which don’t exist (and will also be hugely expensive), and agreements from origin or third-party governments to take the asylum seekers that also do not exist with the key countries or in the numbers that are needed.

Not surprising, perhaps, that the move has left some commentators baffled. The issue does matter, particularly to sections of 2019 Conservative voters. Even voters inclined to take a more generous approach to asylum find the perception of coastal lawlessness disconcerting. But if that’s the case, why draw attention to a policy area where you are so manifestly useless?

One view is that the government can only gain from talking about an issue voters care about.  In the short term that is bound to be true. Labour promises to do better – even with quite specific proposals – may seem weak or carping. Perhaps. And perhaps £500m given to French policing - coming on the back of very large sums in the past - will lead to the ‘collapse of the smugglers’ business model’. If not the impression of (expensive) uselessness will be reinforced.  Unless Labour gives the impression it does not care – something Yvette Cooper and Keir Starmer have not done to date – any lasting Tory gains from talking about the issue look likely to be small.

A more plausible explanation lies in the deliberate flirting will of a willingness to challenge both the European Convention on Human Rights and international conventions on refugees. The issue at stake here is not the niceties of the law, but a question of national sovereignty: the right – as the Conservatives may put it – for this democratic country to take its own democratic decisions.

Sovereignty was, of course, the issue at the heart of Brexit. While the immediate issue driver was immigration, the EU referendum combined that policy issue with the sovereignty question:  Who decides? Us or them? The strongest response came from English identifying voters with a strong sense of national democracy and sovereignty.

Since Brexit ‘was done’, and its benefits have been slow - shall we say - to materialise, the Conservative have struggled to sustain a coalition founded on those shared  ideas of national sovereignty. Asylum, small boats, and the ECHR give them a slim opportunity to put uncontrolled immigration and national sovereignty back together again.

The argument, taken for granted on the liberal left, that a civilised democratic nation should participate fully in international legal agreements may never have enjoyed full popular consent. For all that it was British lawyers who drafted the ECHR, it was not in the expectation that these principles would be required in our own courts. (They were, in effect, writing down our principles for foreigners). The increasingly prominent role played by the ECHR has taken place through legal evolution (including its incorporation by Labour with the promise that nothing was really being changed) but without any measure of real public debate. I’ve not managed to find consistent polling on the ECHR, but what there is does not seem to indicate overwhelming support for membership. And support drops quickly if the question becomes ‘should the ECHR stop a British government doing x’ – a loaded question, but that is how politics works.

The dividing line being created is not directly whether we be in the ECHR, but whether, in principle, an international convention should bar our government from taking the action it deems necessary. Leaving the ECHR is not easy politics: many currently silent Tory MPs would be appalled, and it would have serious consequences for Northern Ireland and for the Brexit withdrawal agreements. But it is very unlikely to reach that stage any time before the next election. The issue will be one of resistance and principle:  are we prepared to challenge court interpretations of the ECHR, or should we roll over and accept them? Stand up for Britain and the decisions of our parliament or concede to the imposition of foreign laws[1]?  This is clearly trickier ground for opposition parties who will want to defend the principle of being a signatory to the ECHR or the Geneva Convention but having to do so irrespective of how it works in practice. While a significant section of the electorate already takes that position for granted, it is by no means self-evident to some of the voters they are trying to take from the Conservatives.

For what it is worth, I think this is a gamble that is as likely to blow up in the government’s face by underling how they have lost control. But it is worth understanding the appeal they are making to voters and why it may strike a chord.

John Denham

(edited 11.3.23.)

[1] I know these are not ‘foreign laws’ but this is the language that will be used.

[continuations]

The World After Capital in 64 Theses

Over the weekend I tweeted out a summary of my book The World After Capital in 64 theses. Here they are in one place:

The Industrial Age is 20+ years past its expiration date, following a long decline that started in the 1970s.

Mainstream politicians have propped up the Industrial Age through incremental reforms that are simply pushing out the inevitable collapse.

The lack of a positive vision for what comes after the Industrial Age has created a narrative vacuum exploited by nihilist forces such as Trump and ISIS.

The failure to enact radical changes is based on vastly underestimating the importance of digital technology, which is not simply another set of Industrial Age machines.

Digital technology has two unique characteristics not found in any prior human technology: zero marginal cost and universality of computation.

Our existing approaches to regulation of markets, dissemination of information, education and more are based on the no longer valid assumption of positive marginal cost.

Our beliefs about the role of labor in production and work as a source of purpose are incompatible with the ability of computers to carry out ever more sophisticated computations (and to do so ultimately at zero marginal cost).

Digital technology represents as profound a shift in human capabilities as the invention of agriculture and the discovery of science, each of which resulted in a new age for humanity.

The two prior transitions, from the Forager Age to the Agrarian Age and from the Agrarian Age to the Industrial Age resulted in humanity changing almost everything about how individuals live and societies function, including changes in religion.

Inventing the next age, will require nothing short of changing everything yet again.

We can, if we make the right choices now, set ourselves on a path to the Knowledge Age which will allow humanity to overcome the climate crisis and to broadly enjoy the benefits of automation.

Choosing a path into the future requires understanding the nature of the transition we are facing and coming to terms with what it means to be human.

New technology enlarges the “space of the possible,” which then contains both good and bad outcomes. This has been true starting from the earliest human technology: fire can be used to cook and heat, but also to wage war.

Technological breakthroughs shift the binding constraint. For foraging tribes it was food. For agrarian societies it was arable land. Industrial countries were constrained by how much physical capital (machines, factories, railroads, etc.) they could produce.

Today humanity is no longer constrained by capital, but by attention.

We are facing a crisis of attention. We are not paying enough attention to profound challenges, such as “what is our purpose?” and “how do we overcome the climate crisis?”

Attention is to time as velocity is to speed: attention is what we direct our minds to during a time period. We cannot go back and change what we paid attention to. If we are poorly prepared for a crisis it is because of how we have allocated our attention in the past.

We have enough capital to meet our individual and collective needs, as long as we are clear about the difference between needs and wants.

Our needs can be met despite the population explosion because of the amazing technological progress we have made and because population growth is slowing down everywhere with peak population in sight.

Industrial Age society, however, has intentionally led us down a path of confusing our unlimited wants with our modest needs, as well as specific solutions (e.g. individually owned cars) with needs (e.g. transportation).

The confusion of wants with needs keeps much of our attention trapped in the “job loop”: we work so that we can buy goods and services, which are produced by other people also working.

The job loop was once beneficial, when combined with markets and entrepreneurship, it resulted in much of the innovation that we now take for granted.

Now, however, we can and should apply as much automation as we can muster to free human attention from the “job loop” so that it can participate in the “knowledge loop” instead: learn, create, and share.

Digital technology can be used to vastly accelerate the knowledge loop, as can be seen from early successes, such as Wikipedia and open access scientific publications.

Much of digital technology is being used to hog human attention into systems such as Facebook, Twitter and others that engage in the business of reselling attention,  commonly known as advertising. Most of what is advertised is  furthering wants and reinforces the job loop.

The success of market-based capitalism is that capital is no longer our binding constraint. But markets cannot be used for allocating attention due to missing prices.

Prices do not and cannot exist for what we most need to pay attention to. Price formation requires supply and demand, which don't exist for finding purpose in life, overcoming the climate crisis, conducting fundamental research, or engineering an asteroid defense.

We must use the capabilities of digital technology so that we can freely allocate human attention.

We can do so by enhancing economic, information, and psychological freedom.

Economic freedom means allowing people to opt out of the job loop by providing them with a universal basic income (UBI).

Informational freedom means empowering people to control computation and thus information access, creation and sharing.

Psychological freedom means developing mindfulness practices that allow people to direct their attention in the face of a myriad distractions.

UBI is affordable today exactly because we have digital technology that allows us to drive down the cost of producing goods and services through automation.

UBI is the cornerstone of a new social contract for the Knowledge Age, much as pensions and health insurance were for the Industrial Age.

Paid jobs are not a source of purpose for humans in and of themselves. Doing something meaningful is. We will never run out of meaningful things to do.

We need one global internet without artificial geographic boundaries or fast and slow lanes for different types of content.

Copyright and patent laws must be curtailed to facilitate easier creation and sharing of derivative works.

Large systems such as Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc. must be mandated to be fully programmable to diminish their power and permit innovation to take place on top of the capabilities they have created.

In the longrun privacy is incompatible with technological progress. Providing strong privacy assurances can only be accomplished via controlled computation. Innovation will always grow our ability to destroy faster than our ability to build due to entropy.

We must put more effort into protecting individuals from what can happen to them if their data winds up leaked, rather than trying to protect the data at the expense of innovation and transparency.

Our brains evolved in an environment where seeing a cat meant there was a cat. Now the internet can show us an infinity of cats. We can thus be forever distracted.

It is easier for us to form snap judgments and have quick emotional reactions than to engage our critical thinking facilities.

Our attention is readily hijacked by systems designed to exploit these evolutionarily engrained features of our brains.

We can use mindfulness practices, such as conscious breathing or meditation to take back and maintain control of our attention.

As we increase economic, informational and psychological freedom, we also require values that guide our actions and the allocation of our attention.

We should embrace a renewed humanism as the source of our values.

There is an objective basis for humanism. Only humans have developed knowledge in the form of books and works of art that transcend both time and space.

Knowledge is the source of humanity’s great power. And with great power comes great responsibility.

Humans need to support each other in solidarity, irrespective of such differences as gender, race or nationality.

We are all unique, and we should celebrate these differences. They are beautiful and an integral part of our humanity.

Because only humans have the power of knowledge, we are responsible for other species. For example, we are responsible for whales, rather than the other way round.

When we see something that could be improved, we need to have the ability to express that. Individuals, companies and societies that do not allow criticism become stagnant and will ultimately fail.

Beyond criticism, the major mode for improvement is to create new ideas, products and art. Without ongoing innovation, systems become stagnant and start to decay.

We need to believe that problems can be solved, that progress can be achieved. Without optimism we will stop trying, and problems like the climate crisis will go unsolved threatening human extinction.

If we succeed with the transition to the Knowledge Age, we can tackle extraordinary opportunities ahead for humanity, such as restoring wildlife habitats here on earth and exploring space.

We can and should each contribute to leaving the Industrial Age behind and bringing about the Knowledge Age.

We start by developing our own mindfulness practice and helping others do so.

We tackle the climate crisis through activism demanding government regulation, through research into new solutions, and through entrepreneurship deploying working technologies.

We defend democracy from attempts to push towards authoritarian forms of government.

We foster decentralization through supporting localism, building up mutual aid, participating in decentralized systems (crypto and otherwise).

We promote humanism and live in accordance with humanist values.

We recognize that we are on the threshold of both transhumans (augmented humans) and neohumans (robots and artificial intelligences).

We continue on our epic human journey while marveling at (and worrying about) our aloneness in the universe.

We act boldly and with urgency, because humanity’s future depends on a successful transition to the Knowledge Age.

[greater-than-the-sword]

All right here we go.

Some background.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier was released in 2014.

Only one year earlier, in 2013, Edward Snowden, a private contractor working with the NSA, leaked a massive dossier to the press, in collaboration with journalist Glenn Greenwald, formerly of the Washington Post.

Snowden worked for a contractor called "Booz Allen", but was "on loan" to the NSA, basically doing whatever NSA told him to. His clearance was something like a system administrator, being able to perform system maintenance and thus access vast swathes of information.

What he witnessed is what is today basically common knowledge: The government is spying on everyone.

Not some people. Not people on whom they are conducting investigations, officially OR unofficially. Everyone. Every major telecom company had collaborated with US intelligence to make backdoors to their customer data, or, "metadata". The NSA captured internet traffic as well and linked metadata like phone call times and locations, credit card purchases, etc. to create behavior profiles much like advertisers now do. Even worse, however, nobody was aware of it and most people didn't use encryption.

What was the last straw for Snowden was watching the director of the NSA deny under oath before Congress the existence of the programs which he himself was employed to service.

The program had never been approved by congress and its operations were unknown to legislators. The most that was known about it was that the government likely had the technological abilities to capture vast amounts of information about average Americans, and this was known because one of the top level developers resigned early on after he sensed the Patriot Act would be used to push the use of his product to unethical and illegal extremes.

Snowden confirmed this was in fact going on and how it was being done and to whom. Everyone was vulnerable. Snowden felt furthermore that the public consciousness of surveillance created a chilling effect on free speech and a soft tyranny of implicit threat; a power that would be the most powerful dissent-stifling tool in history if ever fully awoken.

But how could this have developed without the knowledge of the American people? Only by an entitled intelligence class without obligation to anyone above them in the chain of command. Glenn Greenwald referred to this as "A secret, parallel government underneath the visible government, immune to elections, immune to regime change."

You could almost think of this illegitimate government branch as a sort of organized crime entity parasitizing off of black budget funding (as the destination of these national security dollars is not disclosed to congress). It's hard to overstate the degree to which these programs were actually userpers of the democracy and enemies of the American people.

Kind of like HYDRA.

In CA: TWS, the extremely literal physical manifestation of the spirit of America, having been frozen in time since approximately 1945, wakes up, looks around, and reacts to how America has changed.

Steve fought America's authoritarian enemies, specifically the Nazis. And who could be more authoritarian than the Nazis? Steve represents America as it was when we knew who we were and when we knew what freedom was, before we got used to the slow creep of authoritarianism.

And if that America saw this America, well...

Steve naturally has concerns when he sees SHIELD's new Helicarriers, having the ability to target any individual in the nation in the name of national security, and ultimately refuses to back the project. Steve explicitly cites concerns about government overreach and losing freedom in the name of security in this section.

The parallels continue however as it turns out HYDRA, a literal Nazi holdover, has been running a data mining project to identify potential threats to HYDRA. And HYDRA has literally been operating as a secret organization within SHIELD, going so far as to bend SHIELD's direction all along to produce the Helicarriers, which they were planning to use to eliminate all threats.

The movie makes a double point then; that not only is the surveillance state bad on its own and antithetical to the spirit of America, but that it can easily be used for great evil in the wrong hands.

But the comparison between HDYRA and the NSA is striking in its own right considering that their actions are virtually the exact same. This may seem obvious in retrospect, but remember that it was not long after the brand-new Snowden leaks that the movie was written. The movie functions as a scathing critique of the Obama administration in that the villains were basically doing the exact same thing the Obama administration accomplished; building a vast network of user data that can be used to predict people's behavior and evaluate them as a threat to the government; and build a fleet of murder drones that can take them out.

Shortly after the Snowden leaks, Glenn Greenwald recieved dozens of calls from members of congress asking to be briefed on the programs like PRISM. It's the scariness of a shadow government that is evoked here, and that shadow government unfortunately without a doubt still exists and still takes the same licenses.

CA: TWS took the bold stance of saying, "that's not the real government." And, "that's not my America - that's something that's ultimately an extension of the same evil we fought in the last century, only this time it's on the inside. And that to save America, to be really true to what America is, you have to fight authoritarianism even when it's on the inside."

Does anyone want to read my essay on the connection between the Edward Snowden leaks and Captain America: The Winter Soldier

[primasveraas-writing]

"an echo, my promise"

She will be loved with us.

That is the first promise Bail makes to Padmé after she dies, and his first-ever to Leia.

WORD COUNT: 1189

XXX

Bail doesn’t speak to Padmé before she dies.

Of course, the day she died was also the day the Republic died, so they did hold whispered conversations in the wings of the Senate Building- our worst fears have come to pass, democracy has fallen, what in the stars are we going to do- but few words stick with him. He remembers the fear in Padmé’s eyes as she told him to stay safe, and promised to get back to him soon.

The next time he saw her, she was dying and laboring, and he didn’t speak to her before she died.

And then there are the babies.

They are the only proof of the love that once existed between Anakin Skywalker and Padmé Amidala; they are orphaned before they are a minute old, and Bail cannot save his friend, but.

She will be loved with us.

That is the first promise he makes to Padmé after she dies, and his first-ever to Leia.

---

There are other promises, once Bail and Breha fully accept that they are parents and they begin to figure out their new role. They are Leia’s mother and father now, yes, but they are not the only ones who define her parentage.

There are parts of Leia’s background that Bail prays Leia will never know. How exactly her mother died, for example, or how the memory of her father was destroyed. There is such darkness there, and he fears it.

On most days, Bail can relent Leia’s right to know these things, and that if the Empire is defeated, he will no longer need to protect her from these truths.

On some days, Bail hopes that he never has to break Leia’s heart by telling her.

But there are still silent vows Bail and Breha make to their friend, because Padmé was Leia’s mother too, even if she only laid eyes on her once.

They teach her the history of Naboo and its queens:

She will know your history without knowing that it’s hers, too. She will know you without knowing why.

They raise Leia as a princess, to one day follow in both her mothers’ footsteps:

She will be raised by another queen- a strong, powerful leader. She will be raised in the echoes of your compassion, conviction, and love.

They are her parents. They will love her as Padmé would have. They will love her as parents do.

We will love her when she cries in the middle of the night, although we have barely slept in months. We will love her when she smiles up at us, when we hold her in our arms. We will love her on the days when she is sweet and caring, and we will love her when the anger of her birth father shines through. We have loved her since she first arrived here, and we will love her until death parts us. We will love her even after then.

---

Bail sees so much of Padmé in his daughter- in the way her jaw sets when she’s made her mind, in the way she argues with such stubbornness once she’s made up her mind. He sees Padmé in the warmth of Leia’s brown eyes, in her laugh, in the shape of her face, in her gratefulness as she grows. He sees her in Leia’s passionate speeches, in her empathy and generosity, in her quick wit and deadly humor. There is so much of Bail and Breha there too, but Leia is every bit Padmé’s daughter.

One day she will know you. She will know your family, and she will know where she got all this from.

---

The trouble with raising a princess and a politician’s daughter is that she is angry, stubborn, and dislikes being told no.

In her defense, it is hard to do the latter; Leia is charming and sweet when she wants to be, and when that fails, hardheaded and nearly frightening. She is a force to be reckoned with from the first time Bail hears her cry (she doesn’t cry so much as scream or wail at the top of her lungs- she won’t stand to be unhappy for even a second) and this is a trait that dampens but doesn’t disappear as Leia grows.

When Leia is a young child, she is a menace and sometimes a brat. They love her still, of course, but raising Leia requires patience, and she seems to enjoy challenging them at every turn.

It keeps them on their toes. But it does remind Bail to nurture Leia’s softer side, too.

I will raise Leia into someone you would be proud of.

---

Leia springs onto the galactic stage eagerly, and Bail fears for her safety, because Leia would turn the galaxy upside down if she could, and that is a dangerous goal in the time of the Empire.

First, she wants to work in his Senatorial office. Then, she wants to join the rebel efforts. Then, she wants to run her own Rebellion missions, and have her own command, and do tactical and espionage and rescue operations-

It is so dangerous. Leia refuses to stay away.

I will keep her safe. I will help make the galaxy into a place where she can live freely and thrive.

---

But he cannot protect her from everything, and so Leia’s heart breaks for the first time after a relief mission to a dying world.

There were too many sick and too many dead; Bail should have sent someone else but Leia, naturally, had insisted, so she went and saw unimaginable horrors that she could not stop or lessen.

When she returns to Alderaan, she stands in his office doorway, blinking tears out of her eyes, and Bail rises from his desk, abandoning his work for the day to hold his teenage daughter in his arms, comforting her about the things neither of them can change.

Leia still wants to, though. She still believes she can.

Padmé was naive if only because of her endless belief in the goodness of others. Naive only in the way that she wished changes upon the galaxy that were too far out of reach.

I will protect Leia’s gentle heart, mend it if I have to, and she will continue to carry the empathy that defined your every step.

---

Scarif is razed.

Leia had been sent to rescue the Death Star plans. They don’t know if she succeeded. Nobody on her ship was left alive, Rebellion intelligence suspects.

They don’t know.

Bail is on Alderaan when a new, gigantic moon appears on the horizon.

An evacuation is attempted, but not for the Queen and her consort. There is no time. They will die with their people if that is what it comes to.

(He knows it will).

He is holding Breha in his arms when the sky fills with a searing green light, and the horizon ripples.

When the world around them starts to explode, Bail hears a whisper, a silent reassurance.

The voice is familiar, and it promises:

Leia will be safe.

Hope prevails.

Thank you for loving our daughter as I never could.

[padme-amitabha]

Anidala Week 2021

 Day 1: Missing Scene or Favorite Scene(s)

Anakin Skywalker could not take his eyes off the girl. He noticed her the moment he entered Watto’s shop, even before Watto said anything, and he hadn’t been able to stop looking at her since. He barely heard what Watto said to him about watching the shop. He barely noticed the strange-looking creature that had come in with her and was poking around in the shelves and bins. Even after she noticed he was staring at her, he could not help himself. He moved now to an open space on the counter, hoisted himself up, and sat watching her while pretending to clean a transmitter cell. She was looking back at him now, embarrassment turning to curiosity. She was small and slender with long, braided brown hair, brown eyes, and a face he found so beautiful that he had nothing to which he could compare it. She was dressed in rough peasant’s clothing, but she seemed very self-possessed. She gave him an amused smile, and he felt himself melting in confusion and wonder. He took a deep breath. 

“Are you an angel?” he asked quietly. The girl stared. “What?” 

“An angel.” Anakin straightened a bit. “They live on the moons of Iego, I think. They are the most beautiful creatures in the universe. They are good and kind, and so pretty they make even the most hardened space pirates cry like small children.” 

She gave him a confused look. “I’ve never heard of angels,” she said. “You must be one of them,” Anakin insisted. “Maybe you just don’t know it.” “You’re a funny little boy.” The amused smile returned.

“I’m sorry,” she said quickly, looking upset and embarrassed. “I don’t fully understand, I guess. This is a strange world to me.” He studied her intently for a moment, thinking of other things, wanting to tell her of them. “You are a strange girl to me,” he said instead. He swung his legs out from the counter. “My name is Anakin Skywalker.” She brushed at her hair. “Padmé Naberrie.”

Both Anakin and Padmé were laughing now, and their laughter increased as they saw the look on the unfortunate creature’s long billed face. Anakin looked at Padmé and the girl at him. Their laughter died away. The girl reached up to touch her hair self-consciously, but she did not divert her gaze. “I’m going to marry you,” the boy said suddenly. There was a moment of silence, and she began laughing again, a sweet musical sound he didn’t mind at all. “I mean it,” he insisted. “You are an odd one,” she said, her laughter dying away. “Why do you say that?” He hesitated. ” I guess because it’s what I believe…” Her smile was dazzling. “Well, I’m afraid I can’t marry you..” She paused, searching her memory for his name. “Anakin,” he said. “Anakin.” She cocked her head. “You’re just a little boy.” His gaze was intense as he faced her. “I won’t always be…” he said quietly.”

— Terry Brooks, Star Wars : Episode I - The Phantom Menace

This is one of my favorite Anidala scenes ever because their story starts so sweetly. This scene is so unique to them and after watching the OT, it’s fascinating to see a young Darth Vader as a sweet and innocent child. His interactions as a slave boy with a young queen in disguise is also fits with the fairytale-ish tone and themes in Star Wars. Anakin and Padmé’s first meeting is just precious. 

This is probably the only time, Anakin and Padmé can be themselves without older figures telling them what to do. This is one of the few times Padmé is Padmé Naberrie - not Queen Amidala or Padmé Amidala. It’s interesting to see two young people from different social classes and vastly different cultures and worlds sharing a genuine moment of connection. 

I can add very little to this scene but Anakin proves he has enough clairvoyance (as Admiral Motti mocks him in ANH) to be certain he has met the girl he would marry someday. Even in TPM, little Anakin Skywalker is just as much a slave to Watto as he is to the Emperor in ANH. 

Even Padmé is somewhat surprised by his intensity at such an young age. Anakin also emphasizes on his identity as a person so this scene has dark undertones and references to Darth Vader.  

Another scene I love is the chilling visual parallels with Vader and Padmé in ROTS. The stark contrast between their “deaths” but also the similarities show that they are still connected even while their lives hang in balance. 

Padmé gives birth to life and Anakin loses his humanity. She is in a well-lit medical facility and he is in a cold, dark one. Even their heartbeats are in sync as if they are connected via the Force (which could very well be true, since she was slightly force-sensitive from carrying the twins). 

As the mask lowers on Vader, he whispers (since his vocal cords are badly burnt), “Padmé, help me” and Padmé, always on Anakin’s side, hears his plea and tries to tell that to Obi-Wan with her dying breath. It’s very likely that she heard him through the connection they shared like their connection during the ruminations scene and how Leia felt Luke in ESB and but she was unable to respond as she had given birth and probably lost the temporary force sensitivity. 

 As Anakin takes his first breath as Vader, Padmé takes her last. 

Vader rises like Frankenstein’s monster and Sidious marvels at his new “creation”. Padmé dies all in white, like the angel Anakin believed her to be. The parallels are also reminiscent of the “Death and the Maiden” motif.

Anakin has always felt connected to Padmé since he met her and this is the last time he feels their connection. And that’s how he knows Padmé is truly dead and he has lost her forever.  

Even the chorus “I am a Sith Lord but I could not save her” (even though the lyrics are actually Sanskrit) is haunting. This is where the colors of the republic fade and the black and white symbolism of the empire begins. 

Anakin is now Vader - more machine than man - and stands beside Sidious to assist him in building a tyrannical empire while Padmé dies and takes with her all the colors, love, laughter, cultural beauty, and freedom of the Republic era. Padmé was the personification of the Republic - a flawed but well-intended system and her death represents the democracy whereas Vader represents the Empire. 

Her funeral arrangement makes it seem like she’s drowning like Ophelia - implying that she’s returning to where she belongs. (Her planet Naboo is mostly associated with water and Padmé has often expressed her love for water and lakes in AOTC).

Padmé dying of a broken heart is also fits in with the fairytale whereas Anakin finds himself in a very different world after he wakes up - a world where most of the Jedi had been slaughtered and the survivors were declared traitors, a world where democracy doesn’t exist anymore. And he finds himself kept alive my machinery and he cannot die like his beloved, even if he wishes to. He is now very much a part of the new empire - with his humanity and limbs lost - and he gradually accepts his role as the imperial enforcer. 

Anakin and Padme’s story comes to a conclusion here as their reverse arcs are completed. They have both come a long way since TPM and Padme’s experiences mold her into becoming more emotional and in touch with her feelings from the stoic, reserved Queen Amidala whereas Anakin’s dreams, compassion and search for his identity are lost as he becomes his master’s servant and becomes colder and more stoic. Padmé’s journey was to become more human and learning to put love and family over duty and transition from Amidala to Padmé as Anakin’s unfortunately was to become more inhuman and machine-like, from Anakin to Vader. 

These scenes are where the prequel trilogy ends and the originals begin. 

[blockgamepirate]

Technoblade’s purpose in the political narrative of the Dream SMP

I can’t sleep so I decided to finally write the post I’ve been struggling with for literal months, except way more casual because I can’t be bothered anymore and also I’m sleep deprived.

So the thing is: to me the DSMP storyline has always been primarily political, probably because I was introduced to it through Wilbur who was definitely going for political, and also because I’m just generally interested in political narratives right now. Obviously I appreciate the character work and the personal relationship stuff, that’s what makes it more interesting than just dry allegory, but when it comes down to it, this story is about politics to me. So that’s the angle I’m going to approach it from.

Also not to spoil the conclusions here, but I’m an anarchist, that’s my lens.

(Obviously all of this is about rp from here on out unless otherwise specified)

Basically the situation as Techno joins the server is this: L'Manburg exists as an autonomous nation and is de facto independent although not officially recognised by the Dream SMP. The self-appointed president Wilbur Soot decides to hold an election and rig it in order to consolidate his power over the nation he founded and he gets his VP Tommyinnit to join in on the plan. Their scheme fails and they end up voted out instead. The new president, Schlatt, immediately establishes himself as an authoritarian figure and exiles Wilbur and Tommy.

A couple of points on what the election arc demonstrates:

1: the appearance of democracy can be used for distinctly undemocratic purposes.

2: even if the elections aren’t rigged, the electoral system could be massively flawed and end up favouring a party that in fact didn’t have the popular vote

3: even if the winning government (the coalition in this case) has the majority vote, that doesn’t guarantee that they’ll actually act according to the popular will.

4: the supporters of the losing parties basically just have to let the majority overrule their wishes, espcially since apparently L’Manburg doesn’t have an established role for an opposition, yikes. That’s actually a MAJOR oversight in the system but I’m not gonna go into that too much.

5: frankly as an anarchist I am just deeply cynical towards representative democracy, and just because you have a token appearance of choice and consent doesn’t mean that it isn’t a hierarchical and authoritarian system. And to be fair, from my point of view this applies even to so-called liberal democracies and progressive parties. Full disclosure: even if L'Manburg was the ideal example of a representative democracy (which it very much isn’t) I would still be opposed to it because I fundamentally do not believe in top down systems, even electoral ones.

6: despite all these flaws, all the characters seem to implicitly accept the electoral system as legitimate. There’s criticism against the actions of individual characters acting within the system, such as Quackity calling out Wilbur for trying to rig the election, but nobody is questioning the system itself.

So at this point I’m sitting there, watching all this go down, and thinking “man, this would be so much more bearable if there was an anarchist point of view being represented in the story.”

And hey, look who IMMEDIATELY SHOWS UP.

Okay, I’m not gonna lie, early installation Technoblade is not the best representation of anarchism. I was mostly rooting for him out of sheer contrarianism initially. I didn’t really even care if it would be another Killmonger/Magneto/Zaheer situation because I’m used to reading against the authorial intent when it comes to these things. Sometimes any representation is better than no representation, even with political ideologies. That’s not to say that him just straight up spouting this hobbesian notion of a “dog-eat-dog world” didn’t grate on me, obviously it did.

That kind of worldview of humanity needing authority in order to prevent chaos and conflict is literally antithetical to anarchism and is the favourite talking point of authoritarians, the least anarchist people there are. It’s literally what people use to argue AGAINST anarchism. I think it’s mostly because cc!Techno obviously wasn’t particularly educated on anarchist thought and was just basically having fun roleplaying with his friends at this point. Which is frustrating but fair enough I guess.

Cynical ideas about human nature are pretty deeply rooted in the mainstream, unfortunately, most people just consider it common sense. And like I said, it’s a huge talking point in the propaganda against anarchism.

(… even though in fact these arguments were originally used against proponents of representative democracy. Hobbes himself was very much a monarchist, the idea of letting normal people vote for their representatives would have been terrifying to him. Like surely the world would descent into a free-for-all war, all against all. Imagine letting commoners have OPINIONS, the horror.)

So yeah, that stuff was pretty ehhhhh. It was basically what I’d expected though: cc!Techno isn’t an anarchist and we just don’t get accurate representation from non-anarchists, ever. What I dared to hope was that Techno’s character would at least stay consistent about his opposition to ALL governments. I was pretty sure that he would, even though it seemed like the majority of the fandom at the time was convinced that he would switch over to Schlatt’s side or something. It would have been a really shitty twist, I would have ragequit immediately. I mean what would have been the entire point of his character then? He might as well have been a random mercenary. Why even have his character be an anarchist if you were just going to make him work for a government?

(ftr this is kinda my biggest problem with the Hypixel Skyblock revolution event lol, honestly I think that was a worse depiction of anarchism than early DSMP Technoblade. I mean the speech was good, but… still became a government official, tho. booooooooo, cringe)

And yes, I was rooting against L'Manburg, obviously, and I would have even if it had meant having to deal with another badly written anarchist villain character. I never understood why people saw L'Manburg as the good guys, they were nationalist and exclusionary and their whole existence was based on trying to scam people for money.

I mean they were definitely funny, they were great entertainers. I have no problems with people rooting for them because they’re fun to watch; I did that for a bit too. But people were starting to get really into the story and talk about Wilbur and Tommy, the corrupt politicians, and the country that literally excluded people based on nationality as the heroes, unironically, which was wild to me. And when Wilbur started his “villain arc” well: people called it a villain arc, as if he hadn’t been pretty much a bad guy from the beginning, constantly just out for money and power and taking advantage of the people around him and then pretending to be the victim when challenged. I mean yes he got worse, but I wouldn’t call it a villain arc, more like just a mental breakdown arc.

More importantly, to me L'Manburg represented so many things I hate about the status quo in real life, and seeing the fandom mostly unquestioningly accept it as good just pissed me off. Still pisses me off tbh. I mean, to be diplomatic I could say that I understand the emotional attachment and the way L'Manburg was built up mirrors a lot of how real nations are built and how they create a sense of patriotism out of symbols and a sense of honour and loyalty, and it’s actually really fascinating how it even works in a Minecraft roleplay. Says something about the human mind I guess. Doesn’t mean I have to like it though.

Anyway, I just wanted to see literally any kind of opposition to power, even if it had to come from a character that was unquestionably a villain, which I fully assumed Techno would be. Because political narratives so often just leave us out, or at best barely mention us. And even from a narrative point of view, adding an anarchist perspective to a political story just objectively broadens its scope and actually challenges people who are used to only arguing along the lines of conservative or liberal, welfare state or privatization, nationalism or multiculturalism, etc. Even if the original work dealt with it poorly, at least it would give me the excuse to rant about it on Tumblr, which is kinda why I revived my old Minecraft sideblog for this. (That and pig!Techno fanart.)

Also how can you have a story so fundamentally about power without its counterpoint: the rejection of power?

(Yes, Dream SMP as a whole is definitely a narrative about power, it’s a huge theme for Wilbur, Quackity, Dream, Eret and the Badlanders at least, as well as obviously the anarchist characters from the opposite direction.)

So yeah, the build up to November 16th for me was mainly about the anticipation for what Techno would do, how would Techno’s character respond to the seemingly inevitable formation of a new government. THAT was the point of interest for me, that was what I was the most invested in. Would we get an actual anarchist opposition as a new side to the conflict or would they just awkwardly drop that whole angle? Or even have him team up with Schlatt like a complete sellout? There was so much potential but I worried they might just waste it.

And I was right to worry since apparently in the original script Techno wasn’t supposed to do anything, he was just there to help fight Schlatt and witness the explosion along with everyone else.

And WOW that would have been so incredibly boring

Not even just from the political perspective, just talking about the narrative in general terms here: imagine November 16th without Techno’s plot points. Not only would it have been boring for Techno’s character but it would have been equally boring for basically everybody but Wilbur and Philza. An anticlimactic fight followed by a big explosion that pretty much everybody had seen coming already. Yes, the button room scene is dramatic and heartbreaking… for Wilbur and Phil. But nobody else was there to see it. For everybody else, it was just a big explosion. It would have been such a huge disservice to anyone watching the other POVs.

Techno’s intervention gave everyone an ACTUAL climactic fight, it allowed characters other than Wil and Phil to witness some actual drama happening and to participate in it, rather than just waiting around for the explosion, while also foreshadowing the explosion. Even better, it provoked SO MUCH discussion in the fandom AND gave a perfect hook for future conflicts to arise. Wilbur’s end was tragic but it was, at the time, final. L'Manburg would have still suffered a catastrophe but it would have been left with just the same exact antagonist as before: Dream.

And at this point Dream’s core goals had barely changed, just his approach was now different. Yes, that makes a difference for the plot, but it doesn’t really change much in terms of ideological conflict. Especially since there really isn’t that big of an ideological difference between Dream and Tommy, because arguably neither of them are particularly big on ideology in the first place, they just have conflicting goals and use different tactics to achieve those goals (well, the tactics aren’t always even that different *cough Spirit cough*).

Techno’s conflict with Tubbo and especially Quackity (and honestly most of the other characters in general) brings in so much more depth to the story, just by introducing another angle, not to even mention how much it brings to focus questions about power and violence. These are themes that exist in other characters’s storylines too but nowhere in the same way or as central as with Techno.

I’m getting kind of ahead of myself here, though.

The real twist of November 16th was the fact that Techno WASN’T a straight up villain, actually. It was a twist to me anyway, because with all my cynicism I just didn’t see it coming, I didn’t expect him to actually start making reasonable criticisms. I didn’t expect him to drop the hobbesian arguments entirely and start making points that actually sounded like anarchism.

I have to assume that cc!Techno must have seen some of the criticisms of his character and been inspired to adjust because the difference is pretty notable.

(Sidenote: I’m just forever kinda sad that Techno’s “I may seem like the villain here” monologue was cut from the video and most people never heard it.)

And I felt SO validated by the way, because it works so well in the story! Everyone is mostly content with the restoration of a status quo of some sort, Schlatt is gone, this is supposed to be the good ending, and then Techno calls them all out and turns the narrative around completely: This was just a coup d'état. This was just the previous political leadership retaking power by force. Why is everyone celebrating the same exact system that lead to Schlatt’s authoritarian rule in the first place?

What he does there is force the audience to question the narrative they’ve been presented so far, that they’ve accepted without a thought. It might not convince them, but they can’t just ignore it either.

Whatever you wanna say about the discourse around Techno on that day, in the ideological narrative THIS IS THE IMPORTANT PART. Not who betrayed who or when is political violence justified, that’s about personal relationships and morality and it’s mostly all more relevant to the aftermath than the event itself. In my opinion, the REAL point in the moment is that the characters and the audience were comfortable with the ending only to be presented with a completely new perspective on the events.

It also recontextualises the finale, including Wilbur’s actions! It’s a much more ambiguous end to the Pogtopia vs Manburg arc and to Wilbur’s original run as the head writer. Wilbur’s “even with Tubbo in charge I don’t think [that ‘special place’] can exist again” is vague enough to be dismissed as just part of his paranoia and internal conflict, but with Techno, there’s a concrete question: what if Tubbo, given the same powers as Schlatt, will turn out to be just a new Schlatt? And suddenly you have to wonder what Wilbur meant by his words too. And was all this foreshadowing something about L’Manburg’s future?

Okay I’ve only made it to November 16th and there’s so much more DSMP to talk about but the post is getting too long and I’m starting to lose my energy. Will I ever make a part two? No idea. But I’ll try.

Standard disclaimer: I’m not the spokesperson of anarchism, other anarchists might disagree with my reading

[bring-it-all-down]

Much has been said about the Black Sails finale and its statement of the show’s themes, so I’d like to focus instead on the penultimate episode, specifically the following speech Jack gives as he’s headed back to Nassau with the goal of killing Flint:

The result ahead of us promises to be a victory of a different sort. A true victory. Freedom...in every sense of the word. How many men in the history of the world have ever known it? How remarkable a moment is this? How fortunate are we to be standing on the threshold of it?

I think this speech really gets to the heart of the show: it’s ultimately about what it means to be truly free. While this notion of freedom is discussed in Flint’s unparalleled final speech about dragons, it’s perhaps in 4.09 that we get the fullest exploration of freedom.

There has obviously been a lot written on the subject of freedom throughout human history, and rather than foolishly attempt to summarize thousands of years of philosophy, I’m going to refer to one of my favorite understandings, written by W.E.B. DuBois:

I dream of a world of infinitive and valuable variety; not in the laws of gravity or atomic weights, but in human variety in height and weight, color and skin, hair and nose and lip. But more especially and far above and beyond this, is a realm of true freedom: in thought and dream, fantasy and imagination; in gift, aptitude, and genius—all possible manner of difference, topped with freedom of soul to do and be, and freedom of thought to give to a world and build into it, all wealth of inborn individuality. Each effort to stop this freedom of being is a blow at democracy—that real democracy which is reservoir and opportunity” (The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part Which Africa Has Played in World History, pg. 165.)

DuBois here notes three central elements of freedom: the physical (“to do and be”), the mental (“thought and dream, fantasy and imagination”), and the generational (“give to a world and build into it”). The first two components of freedom are understood by much of Western political philosophy through the terms “negative liberty” and “positive liberty” (coined by Isaiah Berlin), freedom from external threats and freedom to engage in philosophic activity. To these conceptions, DuBois adds a third that all the white dudes who conceived of the other two wouldn’t be concerned with: central to achieving them is the recognition that every individual owes prior and future generations their efforts to maintain liberty, that liberty is not just a theoretical principle but an action.

Turning now to episode 4.09, I think we can begin to understand how each of these three types of freedom overlap.

To start, the conflict of the episode deals with negative liberty. Silver and Flint to some degree know that if one catches the other with the chest, there is a chance they will be killed, and Silver wants the chest to ensure that Woodes Rogers does not kill Madi. In short, they are fighting for their survival, their physical freedom.

Moving on to the flashbacks between Flint and Silver, we begin to see the connection between negative liberty and positive liberty. First, because Silver and Flint are equals without the same political obligations to each other as they have to the crew, the people who serve them and who they serve in turn, they can be honest with each other. Silver recognizes this in telling Flint: “The men...I have to manage how they see me...But for pride to be an issue between you and I, well, I think we’re playing past that by now.” Because they, at that point, have physical/negative liberty with each other, they are then allowed to pursue mental/positive liberty, that being the revelation of their true selves. 

However, Flint becomes aware that this physical liberty is an illusion because Silver is unwilling to meet him equally in their pursuit of positive liberty: 

You know my story. Thomas, Miranda, all of it. Know the role it played in motivating me to do the things that I've done, the things I will do. It has made me transparent to you. Not only that, but when I told you this story, you insinuated yourself into it. The latest in a line of ill-fated partners, situating yourself such that...were you and I ever to come to blows, I'd be forced to hesitate before doing you any harm.

Thus Silver actually has a physical advantage over Flint, negating any semblance of Flint’s physical liberty in their relationship. Through Silver’s attempts to kill Flint in this episode and in the finale, we see that without both physical/mental (or negative/positive) liberty present in any relationship, neither will exist; you cannot have one without the other.

This brings us to what I’ve decided to call generational freedom, though I suppose it could also be called communal freedom. In this episode, the concept of generational freedom is brought up in relation to both Jack and Madi. First, we see it in Jack’s conversation with the man he chose to navigate him to Skeleton Island:

Jack: You sailed with Avery.

Old man: Long time ago.

Jack: 20 years? More, even, maybe?

Old man: More, aye.

Jack: Mm-hmm. You do know where you're going, yes? No, seriously, I've got quite a lot riding on this.

Old man: One day, you'll leave the account. Take a wife, father children. See less and less of the sea until she becomes like a painting hanging on the wall, static and irrelevant to your daily existence. But she'll keep on calling you. And when she does, you'll step into that painting and feel the swell beneath your feet. It'll all come back as if it were like yesterday.

Jack: Is that so?

Old man: I've watched you and yours handle the account since I and mine left it. Accomplish things that no one I ever sailed with could dream of. From what I've overheard, if you reach Skeleton Island, might mean the end of the governor. Maybe keep the account alive a little while longer. Is that so?

Jack: That and more.

Old man: Then I'll take you to it. Hold on to this for as long as you can, for all of us who once had it...and walked away.

In this conversation, we see the generational connections within piracy. The old man sailed with Henry Avery, the person most responsible for establishing the current status of piracy in Nassau, and he is conversing with the person who will usher Nassau into a new era. He is careful to remind Jack of this link and of how unseverable it is; no matter how far away Jack gets from piracy, he will never be able to leave it fully behind. There is some sense of owing his existence in this world to Avery and all those who came before him, a debt he must repay with his actions (namely, removing Woodes Rogers and continuing the life of piracy in Nassau).

Immediately after this conversation, we get Woodes Rogers’ bargaining with Madi. He offers her an ultimatum: accept his treaty or he will kill Silver and all of Silver’s crew, which includes many of Madi’s people. Madi rejects his ultimatum with one of the most poignant speeches in the show:

The voice you hear in your head, I imagine I know who it sounds like, as I know Eleanor wanted those things. But I hear other voices. A chorus of voices. Multitudes. They reach back centuries. Men and women and children who'd lost their lives to men like you. Men and women and children forced to wear your chains. I must answer to them and this war, their war, Flint's war, my war, it will not be bargained away to avoid a fight, to save John Silver's life or his men's or mine. And you believe what you will, but it was neither I nor Flint, nor the Spanish raider who killed your wife. That, you did.

Because of her existence as a former slave who had lived in hiding for most of her life, Madi most fully understands generational freedom. She knows that the supposed freedom Rogers’ treaty offers her and her people is not actual freedom because it fails to address the unfreedom of her ancestors, of the rest of the enslaved people in the Caribbean, because she knows that freedom will never be achieved on the terms of the oppressor. She knows that she owes this war to every victim of England’s empire and that it is the only way to achieve what DuBois calls the opportunity to “give to a world and build into it.” 

This episode thus introduces the idea that “freedom every sense of the word” depends on one recognizing one’s duty to one’s community that consists of not just its current members, but its past and future members. Complete freedom is achieved when one begins to fight to protect the freedom of those who do not yet exist. Madi understands this about freedom, as does Flint, but despite Silver’s insistence that he and Flint are true friends and equals, he is incapable of grasping the generational component of freedom and he therefore ensures that physical and mental freedom, too, will fall outside of his grasp.

[fatenumberfor]

“...I’ve been in the business of teaching Black history for over three decades, and every colleague I know includes Tulsa in their general survey courses. So why do we continually repeat the assertion that this history is completely unknown, a secret, or so shameful no one wants to talk about it? Because the issue has never been about not knowing; it is about a refusal to acknowledge genocidal, state-sanctioned racist violence in the United States, a refusal to recognize the existence of fascism in this country. This is not to say the violence is simply denied by the status quo. No, rather it is disavowed by the white propertied and political classes and displaced onto “ignorant” white racist workers. This narrative obscures how the violence, fomented and promoted by the press and business interests, became a pretext to take the land — an attempted land grab that continued for decades after 1921. [...]

...in telling the story, we focus solely on “Black Wall Street,” which made up just a few blocks of the 35-40 square blocks of Greenwood the mobs destroyed. All we really hear about are doctors and lawyers and entrepreneurs, Black-owned theaters and the luxurious Stradford Hotel, when, in fact, the vast majority of Black Tulsans beaten, killed and displaced were working people. [...] We live in such a materialist, celebrity culture that we measure our “success” by class mobility, by wealth accumulation, and then we fall victim to a tired narrative that white folks destroyed “our” communities out of jealousy over of our success. While there is truth to this, and white looting is clear evidence, the “jealousy” is cultivated, nurtured in the ideology of white supremacy, usually in the guise of patriotism and nationalism, or in the capitalist replacement theory — “N*****s are coming for your jobs!” The mob was largely made up of shock troops engaged in an attempted land grab from which they themselves would not directly benefit. The first spark for the mob wasn’t real estate, but another form of property rooted in patriarchy — property in women. A Black man accused of assaulting a white woman is a more effective dog whistle than Negroes with grand pianos and bank accounts. The second spark, of course, were Negroes with guns. Here we see Black solidarity and fearlessness on full display — Black World War I veterans representing all classes within Greenwood, armed and prepared to defend one of their own, their people and their property. That act of insubordination, more than anything else, convinced white folks to fuel up their planes and build an arsenal. [...]

...Some Black people got to Oklahoma by way of the forced march of the Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees and Seminoles from the Southeastern territories in the 1830s. Some came as slaves of wealthy tribal members, others as spouses and children — part African, part Indigenous. And many died along the way. Later, Black folks joined the exodus out of the South after the Civil War by taking advantage of the Homestead Act to acquire land and create all-Black towns — Oklahoma being a prime destination. But again, on whose land? ...I don’t think the issue of the Tulsa race massacre of 1921 can ever be fully resolved or “repaired” without addressing the question of both holocausts — Indigenous dispossession and African slavery. [...]

...American liberty was built on slavery and dispossession because liberty was fundamentally about property rights. ...liberals hold on to the idea that in the U.S. democracy is a creed passed down to us via these great documents — this myth, if we’re to be honest, has driven the liberal wing of the civil rights movement for decades and still drives it today. [...] I’m less concerned with paranoid right-wing white nationalists than I am with (neo)liberal multiculturalists who side-step the question of power... [...]

...while in principle I can agree that all Black people live with the possibility of being terrorized by whiteness, the possibilities are differential based on class, gender, age, disability, etc. [...] If we only remember the loss of property and wealth and the evisceration of a Black elite, then we only imagine a potential future in which someone like J.B. Stradford could have been the Black “Hilton,” where the wealthy are wealthier, and projected “reparations” payments are calculated based on accumulated property at the time of the violence. Despite recognizing that the entire community suffered, “compensation” would be differential, mirroring the very system of racial capitalism that structured enclosure (segregation), violence, deep inequality and poverty for most, and premature death. We will also forget what might be the most impactful response by the community: mutual aid, a caring culture, and the impulse toward self-defense and protecting one another. [...]

...In our Herrenvolk Republic, liberalism was founded on a definition of liberty that places property before human freedom (and human needs), and an exclusionary definition of the human that permits various forms of unfree labor, dispossession and subordination based on “race” and “gender.” And yet, we keep speaking of the Tulsa race massacre in terms of property, property rights, property destroyed. I think we need to talk about decolonization in order to advance beyond land as property toward a vision of freedom not based on ownership or possession or anthropocentrism. The land has been enslaved and needs liberation so the Earth could flourish, so people could flourish, so the historical and contemporary structures of violence might end, opening up a radically different future.”